


When All of the Embers Fell

by StaticCat



Series: Killjoys Never Die [1]
Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album)
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Hurt/Comfort, Loss, Origin Story, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-06
Updated: 2020-01-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:28:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22139314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StaticCat/pseuds/StaticCat
Summary: Killjoys are born of sand and tragedy, but they always come from somewhere else.First of the "Killjoys Never Die" series.
Series: Killjoys Never Die [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1593550
Kudos: 12





	When All of the Embers Fell

**Author's Note:**

> Final form reached 01/26/2020; sorry if you read it before, I did add a little more backstory to Kobra and Party, but the end of their story is the same.

It had been three years since the Helium Wars ended, four years since Better Living Industries had taken over Battery City and turned it into a fascist stronghold. It was in the works for much longer, of course, the process having begun in the years and months leading up to the devastation, with its cruel reign solidified during the chaos that followed. 

Before the Wars, Party Poison remembered being happy, living with his parents and younger brother in the city. But as BL/ind’s influence stretched, that contentment bled away and one by one their freedoms were taken from them. First it was just a curfew, and then media restrictions, and then spontaneous blackouts. Then came the addition of drugs to the water supply--added medications to protect them from the effects of possible radiation attacks, they had said. But Party saw the change in his parents, friends, coworkers. Then felt the fog settling in his own brain, dimming his emotions and desires, leaving behind a shell of who he had been. Even his memories faded away: the one of his brother’s thirteenth birthday party, the last one before he was too cool for such childish things; his mom’s face on the day of his graduation; listening to his dad play guitar on the porch on lazy summer nights. But it didn’t matter, he didn’t miss them, didn’t even notice they were gone. 

Kobra Kid noticed. The drugs didn’t affect Kobra, for a reason that he didn’t understand. He didn’t think anything of it at first, just figured the rest of the city was distressed and subdued by the war raging on in the rest of the world. The day he finally realized it, his brother stared blankly at him when he made a joke about Party's sardine addiction. It wasn’t that Party didn't find it funny--it was that there was no spark of recognition behind his eyes. Kobra watched, noticed the same changes in his parents. He felt alone, and it terrified him.

Ongoing specialized training in engineering had saved him both of them from being drafted. Kobra tried to keep his head down, just going to classes and avoiding as many people as he could. Including his family. It was too hard to see the blank look in Party’s eyes, the fake smile on his mother’s lips. Most nights he holed up in his room with his computer, working on code to hack into BL/ind’s headquarters and try to figure out what exactly was going on. 

In the end, someone figured him out. He wasn’t sure if it was through the worm he’d managed to get on the network, or if they simply noticed the BL/ind-approved smile was missing from his face. Either way, they came to their house, breaking through the door and pulling Kobra out of his chair. As he cried for his brother, for anyone, to save him, Party woke up. Those screams created a break in the fog in his brain, and without even thinking, he launched at the two men who had their hands on Kobra. Their parents sat on the couch, unfazed by the commotion happening around them, unfazed by their sons’ desperation and fury.

But luckily, the men were in their own kind of fog. BL/ind’s agents weren’t prepared for so much resistance. Party grabbed his brother’s hand and tore from the house, letting adrenaline carry them through dark alleys until Kobra took over and led them all the way to the edge of the city. He hadn’t expected the gates to be so heavily guarded. 

Kobra still isn’t sure exactly what happened. Dust clouds blossomed around them and the laser beams flew so close they melted the polyester fiber of his shirt sleeve. Party's body fell in a twisted heap--no no no Kobra had just gotten his brother back, he couldn’t be gone so soon. Grief ripped from his body in an agonized scream, and he found his hands on the gun of a fallen Scarecrow. He pulled the trigger again and again, hardly looking where he was shooting, rage blinding him to anything happening around him. 

And then he woke up in the back of a van, flying down a sandy highway, Party sitting next to him with a terrified look on his face. Kobra cried and gripped his brother hard to his chest, tears falling freely into Party’s dirty hair. When his brother clutched him back with shaking arms, Kobra cried even harder. 

Later, in a dilapidated radio studio, their saviors introduced themselves. Dr. Death Defying, an ex-soldier who made use of a wheelchair. Show Pony, with their playful leggings, impractical roller skates, and kind smile. Hot Chimp, pink streaks in her blonde hair and a look in her eye that said she’d seen far too much for her young age. And then there was Fun Ghoul.

\--

Ghoul’s parents had always been hippies. They carted him around the state to various music festivals, even as a young boy. Let him get his first tattoo for his fourteenth birthday. Held his hair back when he came home throwing up mushrooms some guy said would make him see the gods. Ghoul grew up with the sun on his face and the wind in his hair. He knew his life was different from other kids’, but open roads and cloudless days were all he needed to be happy.

And his parents. He adored his parents, and they adored him. They did everything together. His father taught him calculus and physics and how to read sheet music. His mother made him read Kurt Vonnegut and showed him how to replace a carburetor. They went on walks together, gathering plants for various household uses; they baked bread in their backyard earth oven on Saturday nights. There were no rebellious teenage fights, no testing of boundaries, because they respected his and trusted him. 

A week before his seventeenth birthday, the neighbors came over and asked if they’d seen the news. They didn’t have a TV, so they hadn’t. The mayor of Battery City appeared on all the broadcasts to urge residents in the surrounding towns to move into the city, saying the War was coming to their own backyard and the city had the resources to protect them. Most of Ghoul’s neighbors went. He and his parents stayed. 

Five months later, the first bomb dropped. His dad had taken a television from one of the neighbors when they fled, and the three of them watched the footage with horror. His mother worried that it might be time to move into the city, but Ghoul didn’t want to go. The propaganda flooding the airwaves scared him more than war did. 

And one month after that, soldiers showed up at their door. The United States government had fallen, and Battery City was instating their own draft to protect the region. They were informed that any able bodied person from ages 17 to 39 must accompany them to the city to begin their training. That meant Ghoul.

“Hell no!” Ghoul said, right before taser prongs struck his chest and forced his rattling bones to the floor. His devotedly pacifist father unsheathed his bowie knife and charged at the men, who promptly blew a hole in his head. When his mother screamed, they shot her too. 

Adrenaline and rage surged through Ghoul with enough force that he was able to pull the barb from his chest. One Scarecrow aimed, and he kicked the gun from his hand before he could pull the trigger. A well placed headbutt knocked the other one to the floor, and Ghoul ran. He ran into the desert, as far away from the echoes of his mother’s screams as he could. 

Days later, he laid flat on his back under the meager shade of a Joshua tree and waited for dehydration to take him. What little water he’d been able to steal from abandoned houses was gone. He had no way of knowing where he was, of which direction might lead him towards more water. With eyes closed, he sent a silent prayer to the Phoenix Witch, a goddess his mother had favored, and steeled himself for the endless sleep he knew was coming. 

“Whatcha doin’?”

Ghoul could barely open his eyes again. When he did, he was only sort of surprised at the helmeted person on roller skates that stood before him. Maybe this is what the Phoenix Witch actually looks like. 

“Dyin’.”

“Well why’d you wanna do a silly thing like that?”

“Can’t help it. Outta water.”

“Shoulda said something, I got some right here.”

Ghoul didn’t move. It didn’t matter. He was ready to die, maybe even already dead.

“Gonna gimme some trouble, I see. Let’s getcha outta the sun.”

“No,” Ghoul moaned. 

“Yuuuup, that definitely means it’s time to go.”

The stranger raised Ghoul by his arms and hoisted him over their shoulder. Ghoul didn’t struggle, didn’t care. Didn’t bother even trying to stay awake. 

In the end, he was glad he lived. Show Pony and Doctor Death Defying nursed him back to health, and when he realized it wasn’t a dream he could wake up from, he told them about his parents. They shared their own stories of loss and helped him feel whole again, told him how they picked new names to accompany their new lives and encouraged him to do the same. They set him up in a small service station with Hot Chimp, who held him when he woke up screaming and never brought it up in the morning. They introduced him to the resistance fighting BL/ind and their control over Battery City. Their numbers were small, but grew everyday. People escaping the city for a free life. Refugees from farther zones. Ex-soldiers fed up with the lies. He built explosives, smuggled goods out of the city, and taught new killjoys about the freedom of the desert. When the news came that the War was over, they didn’t blink an eye. Their real war was with BL/ind. 

On one of their runs, just as they were flying past the city gates, he saw two young men, looking only slightly older than himself, being chased by Scarecrows. 

“Chimp, stop!” he yelled. “We gotta help ‘em!”

Show Pony looked out the window. “Aw fuck yeah, we do.” 

Chimp swung the van around, aiming for the group of Draculoids guarding the gates. The crunch of bodies under their wheels would have been sickening, if they weren’t Dracs. 

Ghoul, flanked by Pony, jumped from the van and threw a smoke bomb into the carnage. One of the escapees had fallen, and his companion was shooting blindly at anything and everything in front of him. Ghoul lived for chaos, but had never found indiscriminate laser blasts to be a good thing. 

Pony created cover for Ghoul to reach the boys and smack the crazy one with the butt of his blaster. The shots stopped and he fell. The other one had regained consciousness and was sitting frozen a few feet away. Ghoul threw the shooter over his shoulder and yelled at his friend to follow. They hauled ass into the van and Chimp peeled away.

The one with longer hair tried to rouse the lanky one, whispering his name in his ear and holding his hand. It wasn’t long before he woke up, and Ghoul was finally able to tell they were brothers. The resemblance was unmistakable. They held each other the rest of the way to the radio station. And Ghoul missed his fucking parents more that day than anything.

\--

The boys didn’t want to tell their story, and no one made them. When Doctor Death Defying had explained the purpose of the names, they were quick to pick new ones, eager to move past the trauma of BL/ind’s influence and the horrifying moments when they thought they’d lost each other. 

Doc directed them to cots in the basement of the station and told them they’d figure everything else out after they gained their bearings. They spent over a week down there while Kobra held Party’s hair as withdrawal from the drugs made him violently ill. In between episodes, Party cried, and Kobra held him then, too. The lifting of the fog led to an overwhelming flood of old memories, and the guilt of nearly letting his brother be dragged away was too intense for his brain to process. He remembered the pain in Kobra’s eyes, the nights Kobra’s nightmares woke him through his bedroom wall, but the worst part was that he remembered doing nothing.

Kobra didn’t blame him, and he told Party that every time he tried to apologize. And Party apologized a lot. For succumbing to the drugs, for not being there to hold him through the nightmares, for accidentally puking on Kobra's blanket, for Kobra having to comfort him. But Kobra didn’t care. He had his brother back, vomit and all, and that was the only thing that mattered.

\---

Jet Star hadn’t been been able to escape the draft after he finished school, his medical training making him a valuable resource. The drugs flowing through his veins convinced him it was the right thing to do, but a tiny voice in the back of his head screamed otherwise. After basic training, before they sent him to the front lines, they stopped giving him the drugs. They needed their soldiers alert. Jet almost wished they hadn’t, because all of the new emotions he felt were overwhelming. Anger, betrayal, confusion, but above all, fear. Jet didn’t want to die, but he didn’t know how to escape the control that BL/ind exerted over him and everything around him. So he went to war.

The reek of bodies burnt by laser blasts was overwhelming. The first time Jet experienced it, he barely got his helmet off before he puked all over his shoes. Another boy whose name he never learned tried to pull the curls away from his face but ended up puking himself. Soon, they both got used to the smell, and Jet’s innocence was officially dead. 

He fought for three years. In that time, he saw more bodies than he thought possible. He was on the clean up crew after the second bomb went off. He tended to mangled men and helped pile bloody, steaming bodies by the hundreds so they could be safely disposed of. They did the whole thing wearing plastic suits, and Jet was completely drenched by the end of the first day. The second day, the inside of the suit was still damp and he could smell the fear reeking in the sour smell of his sweat as he tugged it back on. 

Even after the war ended and the troops finally pulled back, Jet wasn’t allowed to be discharged. They simply moved him to an outpost at the edge of the zones where he kept an eye on the horizon for rogue enemies, rebels, and the monsters that emerged from the radiation. He appealed to return to the city, but BL/ind was determined to keep their control of Battery City at any cost, including the sanity of their soldiers.

One night, he watched his commander behead a young rebel who couldn’t have been more than thirteen. And that was the night he used his boot knife to dig the BL/ind monitoring device out of his neck and left the outpost. 

He was familiar enough to the zones to have a rough idea of where the rebels had control. As long as they weren’t too close to the outpost, the soldiers mostly left them to the Dracs and the Scarecrows. After two long days, the first illuminated dwelling he came to happened to be a rebel radio station, and he was too desperate to worry about what they might do with a BL/ind soldier. He couldn’t imagine anything worse than being forced to continue protecting BL/ind’s twisted mission. So he threw his weapons and helmet into the sand and knocked on the door, standing back with his hands raised. 

The door inched open and a blaster emerged. “Who the fuck are you?” a man growled. 

“I was a soldier, but I’m not anymore. I can’t-” Jet faltered. When he spoke again, he hated how broken he sounded. “I can’t go back.”

“What the fuck am I supposed to do with you?”

“Honestly, I don’t care. Shoot me, send me away, just don’t make me go back.” 

The man lowered his blaster. “You armed?”

Jet nodded towards pile of equipment on the ground. “Take it all. I can’t look at it anymore.” 

The door swung open and a tall man with a streak of grey visible in his shaggy brown hair appeared. The sleeves on his military green shirt had been ripped, and dogtags hung from his neck. 

“I’m not gonna shoot you. You’re me from another life,” he said, his voice soft and somber. “Now get inside, it’s fucking cold out here.” 

Jet stumbled through the sand to make it to the door. In the light he could finally see the man’s face. His eyes were the same ones that he’d seen on hundreds of men he’d patched up in the last three years. 

“Here’s some water, I’m sure you need it. I’ll grab you a can of beans and some clothes that won’t make me want to fucking scream,” the man said. “Name’s Cherri Cola, by the way.” 

“Th-thank you. I’m--”

“No you’re not,” Cherri interrupted. “That guy’s dead, just dust in the desert. It’s time you decide who you want to be.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm posting this as a series rather than a chaptered work because I think they can mostly be read alone. Right now I have scenes and ideas that need pieced together and don't want to disappoint anyone by leaving a work unfinished because that breaks my damn heart every time. This one specifically really doesn't fit with the tone of the next one, so it's all on its own.


End file.
